Updated 2 years ago
d. September 3, 2001
Sergei was a psytrancer was well known within the New York Russian community including Alphatrance. He died in a shark attack in Avon, North Carolina right before 9/11, at the tail end of the so-called “Summer of the Shark” where media went into a frenzy over sharks that had little correlation with actual shark attacks.
Editors Note: I do NOT want to turn this into Sharknado, Shark Week, or Jaws. Sergei should be remembered for his life, and not for the shark. Any information about Sergei’s life would be greatly appreciated. Send here.
Sergei’s death was covered all of the world. Here are a few news items:
New York Times
Virginia created a task force today to investigate two fatal shark attacks over the Labor Day weekend, and Florida was considering regulating shark feeding by scuba divers.
The moves follow several shark attacks this summer.
The first death was on Saturday in Virginia Beach, where David Peltier, 10, was attacked in the surf. Two days later, and 135 miles to the south, a shark killed Sergei Zaloukaev, 28, and gravely injured his girlfriend, Natalia Slobodskaya, 23, off a North Carolina beach. Ms. Slobodskaya was in critical but stable condition today in a hospital in Norfolk, Va. The couple lived in Northern Virginia.
”I think that we have to explore ways to make our waters safer or at least find out the facts of what is occurring, if anything,” Gov. James S. Gilmore III of Virginia said.
Experts say there have not been two fatal shark attacks in one year in the United States since 1994. Shark attack reports have inched higher in the past decade, but experts say that is because more people are in the water and that 2001 is shaping up as an average year.
Mr. Gilmore said marine biologists and state and local officials would assess shark populations off Virginia; ways to predict, prevent and respond to attacks; and how to teach the public about risks.
The task force will also determine whether people are doing anything to increase the likelihood of attacks.
In Florida, which leads the nation in reported shark attacks, wildlife officials said today that they were considering whether to regulate shark-feeding scuba dives.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission will consider the regulations in a meeting on Thursday. Opponents of regulation say the practice, in which tourists watch dive leaders feed chunks of fish to sharks, teaches the sharks to associate people with food.
None of the shark attacks in the United States this year were during feeding dives.
Original New York Times article
Los Angeles Times
“I Felt Something Grabbing Me, Something Big”
NORFOLK, Va. — The first time, the shark merely brushed against her–a rough surface scraping her back and legs.
The second time, the shark got hold of Natalia Slobodskaya by her foot. She felt it release her and then bite her again. And again.
“I felt something grabbing me, something big grabbing me two or three times,” Slobodskaya, 23, said last week from her bed at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, recovering from the Sept. 3 attack. “I remember thinking it was actually biting me.”
The shark was unpredictable.
“We just knew that she was somewhere around us, because several times I felt her approaching,” said Slobodskaya, who had been swimming at dusk about 100 feet offshore with her fiance at Avon, N.C. “She was all around us. . . . It was very hard to say where she would come from the next moment.”
Slobodskaya lost track of the number of times the shark’s teeth tore into her during what she estimated was a two-to-three-minute ordeal that came with no warning–not a splash or a fin breaking the surface of the murky green water.
In the last few weeks, she has gone over each detail again and again. She has wanted to reconstruct the events that led to the death of her fiance, Sergei Zaloukaev, 28, a computer consultant, who became the first shark-attack fatality in North Carolina in 50 years.
A 10-year-old Richmond, Va., boy, who was attacked by a shark a day earlier in Virginia Beach, Va., about 135 miles up the coast, also died over Labor Day weekend.
Slobodskaya is being treated for a severed left foot and the loss of a fingertip on her left hand and has received skin grafts to replace a 15-inch-long chunk of flesh torn out of her upper left thigh and buttock.
It was to have been a seaside idyll in a rented beach house, a chance to be with friends before going back to school and work. That day, she and her fiance were the last swimmers in the water. Wind swept the surface of the ocean, and the water was deep green in the early evening light, “an unusual green, the color of a bottle,” Slobodskaya said. She estimates she was in about 10 feet of water, swimming parallel to the shore. Zaloukaev was swimming in front of her.
“At that moment, Sergei turned and said, ‘It’s a shark. Swim faster,’ ” said Slobodskaya, a Moscow native who is a graduate student at George Washington University. “Then we both started swimming to the shore as fast as we could, and we’re both good, strong swimmers.”
They aimed for the surf line, where the waves break and where she thought it was too shallow for a shark. But again, she felt the shark in the water. She turned and pushed the animal away with her left hand.
“I pushed it away and I felt it; I touched it,” Slobodskaya said. “The most horrifying thing I remember is when the shark touched me and her skin was rough. When you feel something like that next to you, you instinctively push it away.”
At the time, she had no idea the shark had attacked Zaloukaev too. There was no chance for conversation. He swam near her but slightly ahead of her, trying to make his way to shore.
“Several times I heard Sergei screaming,” she said. “We were both terrified.”
Slobodskaya kept swimming, moving by the force of adrenaline and feeling no pain initially.
“At some point, I felt there was something wrong with my leg, my hand,” she said. “I think in cases of such massive shock, you don’t feel much pain.”
When she and Zaloukaev reached the surf, they waved and screamed for help, trying to alert their friends on the beach. The swimmers felt weak, and the surf was heavy and hard to cross.
“Sergei helped me from the waves several times, and I didn’t realize how badly he was injured,” she said. “He spent some of that last energy on me.”
Slobodskaya remembers looking at the water. “It was this weird green, totally mixed with blood. It was all around us.”
Friends dragged the couple onto the sand, keeping Slobodskaya a short distance from her fiance, who was in bad shape with a severed artery in his leg.
“I heard what was going on over there, and I understood it wasn’t good,” Slobodskaya said.
Lying there, surrounded by friends, Slobodskaya finally felt the pain of her wounds.
She has undergone a half-dozen surgeries and faces more. But her doctors have said she is healing more quickly than they had expected and should make an excellent recovery.
Facing up to two more weeks in the hospital, she has no health insurance, and bills are mounting. Her friends have set up a Web site, www.helpnatasha.com, hoping for donations.
Meanwhile she practices walking on her new artificial foot, the first of two temporary prostheses she will have before she is fitted with a more flexible permanent foot.
She has put her graduate courses on hold and hasn’t decided whether she will go back to live in the Oakton, Va., townhouse she shared with Zaloukaev.
“I had a practical mind on that day. I realized I was losing a lot of blood and that I should stay conscious,” she said. “Now I have emotions. How does it feel to lose the closest person to you? I don’t know what my life will be like now.”
Richmond.com: 2nd Shark Attack
The day after a fatal shark attack in the surf of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, the National Park Service and Coast Guard led flights over the water to look for unusual shark activity, said Mary Doll, Cape Hatteras National Park Service spokeswoman.
Sergei Zaloukaev, 28, and Natalia Slobodskaya, 23, were swimming in the waist-deep surf along Avon, a community just north of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, when they were attacked around 6 p.m Monday by a shark or sharks.
While a Coast Guard helicopter flight failed to spot any sharks in the area near Hatteras Lighthouse Tuesday morning, a Park Service fixed-wing plane spotted 3-5 sharks near Cape Point, and another 8-10 at Hatteras inlet, Doll said.
However, Doll said, this was not an unusual number of sharks to find. Beaches were open on Tuesday along the coast.
The two victims, both Russian nationals who lived in Oakton in Northern Virginia, were part of a group of friends visiting North Carolina from the Washington area, according to Dorothy Toolan, Dare County public information officer.
They were swimming about 20 to 40 feet off shore near a sandbar when they were attacked just off the beach at Greenwood Place in the Askins Creek area of south Avon.
A dispatcher for the Dare County Emergency Management office said, “It was beautiful day and there were several people in the water with them.”
The couple suffered “multiple dramatic injuries” to their legs and buttocks, according to Dr. Seaborn Blair of the of the Avon Medical Center.
The Hyde County Sheriff’s Department was the man was killed and the woman was flown to the Norfolk Sentara Hospital with substantial wounds to her lower torso.
Slobodskaya is a graduate student at George Washington University in Washington, reportedly working on a doctorate in human sciences. She received her undergraduate degree in May 2000 from the Elliott School of International Affairs at the same university, a university official said.
She lost her left foot, a bone-deep chunk 12 inches in diameter from her left buttock and upper thigh, and a portion of her left middle finger in the attack, hospital officials said.
Zaloukaev bled to death after his left leg was severed below the knee.
Carlene Beckham, an employee of the Avon Fishing Pier about a mile from the attack scene, told the Raleigh News & Observer that her 15-year-old son ran down to watch as emergency crews carried the couple away.
“He said it pretty gruesome,” Beckham said. “The man’s foot was gone and the rest of his leg was pretty well torn up. From the hip down it was pretty fleshy.”
On Tuesday, officials at the Norfolk hospital said the woman was in critical but stable condition.
The last reported fatal shark attack off North Carolina was in 1957, according to the International Shark Attack File in Gainesville, Fla. There were five attacksin North Carolina last year, none fatal.
The waters off North Carolina are home to all kinds of sharks, said Jack Musick, professor of marine science at The Virginia Institute of Marine Science and head of the Shark Research Program.
The water off Cape Hatteras is bull shark territory, he said.
“They’re the ones that are the problem,” Musick said. “They like to eat large animals like sea turtles.”
A shark aggressive enough and powerful enough to attack two people, killing one, would have to be one of the bigger sharks, such as a bull shark, said George Burgess of the International Shark Attack File.
“It’s a large shark,” he said. “And more commonly found right along the beach with a reputation for attacking humans.”
Bull sharks have been implicated in a number of severe attacks, including a July attack on an 8-year-old boy in Pensacola, Fla., and a fatal attack on a man in St. Petersburg, Fla., last summer, he said.
The attack came two days after 10-year-old David Peltier of Richmond was killed by a shark in the waters off Virginia’s Sandbridge, about 100 miles to the north. Both attacks came at approximately 6 p.m. (See related story)
UPI: Man dies, woman injured in shark attack
FORT RALEIGH, N.C., Sept. 4 — A 28-year-old Russian-born man was killed and his 23-year-old female companion was critically injured at the Cape Hatteras National Seashore in the second fatal shark attack in the Atlantic Ocean in three days, officials said Tuesday.
The couple was wading in about 3 feet of water Avon about 50 feet from shore when they were attacked by a shark about 6 p.m. Monday, Dare County authorities said.
A National Park Service spokeswoman said an autopsy was being conducted on the body of Sergei Zaloukaev of Arlington, Va. The injured woman, identified as Natalia Slobonskaya, of Vienna, Va., was in stable but critical condition after undergoing surgery at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in Norfolk, Va.
“This is the first fatal shark attack in North Carolina since 1957. There were five shark attacks last year in North Carolina,” said David Griffin, director of the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island.
Authorities said Zaloukaev was pronounced dead on arrival at Avon Medical Center. Slobonskaya was taken by helicopter to the Norfolk hospital.
“There were severe injuries to both people to their lower legs, thigh areas. There was considerable blood loss,” Dare County Public Safety Director Skeeter Sawyer said.
“By the time we arrived, the victim was in full cardiac arrest,” Sawyer said. “The female victim did have a foot that was amputated just above the ankle by the attack.”
Gary Harkin of Columbus, Ohio, told the Virginian-Pilot newspaper that he and two friends helped the couple back to shore after the attack. He says the man had lost a leg but “was still talking when he came out of the water.”
Park service spokeswoman Mary Doll said no one saw a shark in the water before the attack, which occurred during “clear conditions.” She said Coast Guard aircraft were patrolling the coast Tuesday.
A 10-year-old boy died Sunday after being attacked by a shark off Virginia Beach, Va., about 135 miles up the coast from Avon, on Saturday. Funeral services are scheduled for Thursday in Richmond for David Peltier, who became the first person in the country to die of a shark attack this year.
Witnesses said a shark tore a 17-inch gash in the boy’s leg and only released him after Peltier’s father hit the shark on the head. The boy died several hours later after losing large quantities of blood from a severed artery.
Tourism officials along the East Coast expressed concern about the Labor Dayweekend shark attacks.
“Being a resort community as we are, we hate to hear that,” said Walter Parker, the mayor of Tybee Island, a barrier island about 18 miles east of Savannah, Ga.
“Our lifeguards try to keep people in an area close to the shoreline so they don’t get into deep water. We haven’t had any incidents at all this year,” Parker said.
In Florida, a sailor was bitten as he went swimming near the Mayport Naval Station near Jacksonville on Sunday. Authorities said the sailor suffered a bite to the foot and was treated at a hospital and then released. It was the second shark bite reported in Duval County this year.
